Frankenstein

Author: Mary Shelley

It is the summer of 1816. Mary Wollstonecraft is 18, and is travelling through Europe with her lover of two years, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The couple arrive in Geneva in May to stay with Lord Byron, who has rented a villa there along with his mistress, Claire Claremont, and his young doctor, John Polidori. But it turns out to be a miserable summer, and they spend the rainy evenings telling each other ghost stories. Then, they challenge each other to make up new stories. Polidori produces The Vampyre, a precursor of Dracula. Mary, after a nightmare, and recalling the current experiments by Galvani, comes up with Frankenstein. The novel was published, anonymously, two years later, then a revised edition under her name appeared in 1831.The novel is the story of a young and impatient scientist, Victor Frankenstein who, experimenting with electricity, manages to bring life back to dead flesh. He makes a living being from bits of dead men, but he sees the creature as ugly and so abandons it. Alone and terrifying anyone who sees it, the creature still manages to teach itself to speak and to read, and eventually he seeks out Frankenstein to persuade him to make a mate. Frankenstein agrees, but destroys the female before animating her; in revenge, the creature kills Frankenstein's fiancÃƒÃƒÃ‚Â©e on the eve of their wedding. Eventually the two, creator and created, disappear into the wastes of the North Pole. Why It Made the ListAccording to Brian Aldiss, Frankenstein was the first science fiction novel. Even if you don't accept this, there's no denying that it was one of the most influential books in the entire history of the genre. Everything from Jeckyll and Hyde to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, owe a debt to Frankenstein.

Similar Recommendations

Frankenstein has been called the first science fiction novel, but there are several other contenders for that title. For instance, you might try Utopia by Thomas More, the original work about a perfect land, and a book that has been even more influential than Frankenstein.

Or there's The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin, about an anti-hero shipwrecked on a remote island, who tries to escape by building carriage powered by wild geese. But the geese, as it was then believed, migrated to the Moon, so he is swept along, experiencing weightlessness along the way, and then discovering a noble society on the moon.

Or, again, there's The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish, in which a lady is kidnapped by pirates, abandoned at the North Pole, finds another world joined to ours at the pole, and in time becomes empress of that world.

Meanwhile, Frankenstein has inspired very many books as sequels or variations of the story. There is, for instance, Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss, in which a 21st century politician is transported back to Geneva in 1816 to meet both Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein.

Or there's Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop, in which the immortal creature survives the Arctic wastes and reappears in the Deep South of America during World War Two playing minor league baseball.